Sustainable Construction, 5th Edition

Part IGreen Building Foundations

This book is intended to guide design and construction professionals through the process of developing commercial and institutional high-performance green buildings. A green building can be defined as a facility that is designed, built, operated, and disposed of in a resource-efficient manner using ecologically sound approaches and with both human and ecosystem health as goals. This book addresses the application of building assessment systems such as LEED¹ and Green Globes² in the United States, as well as several noteworthy building assessment systems used in other countries. Part I addresses the background and history of the sustainable construction movement, various green building rating systems, the concept of life-cycle assessment, and green building design strategies. It is intended to provide the working professional with sufficient information to implement the techniques necessary to create high-performance green buildings. This part contains the following chapters:

• Chapter 2: Background
• Chapter 3: Ecological Design

Chapter 2 describes the emergence of the green building movement, its rapid evolution and growth over the past decade, and current major influences. This chapter also addresses the unusual scale of resource extraction, waste, and energy consumption associated with construction, and it examines the resource and environmental impacts of the built environment. Although this book focuses on the United States, the context, ...